Saturday Morning Landscaping

Stephen and I have a bunch of projects we want to tackle at the house.  We don't have an official "To Do List" because I'm afraid of what that might look like.  On that imaginary list was landscaping the front yard and with each of us getting out of work early on Friday, we decided to tackle the front yard.  We have a pretty nice hill from the sidewalk up to the house and mowing the grass there is always difficult.  Also, once the azaleas have bloomed and gone, there isn't much color in front of the house.

We didn't take a before picture this weekend, so below is the best we can do.  Imagine the snow isn't there anymore... but grass and dirt.  Nothing too exciting.

It's such a cute house, we need to accessorize more!  We started with digging up all the grass and weeds in the area from the bottom of the wall to the top of the stairs.  That area became our flower bed.  With the $100 gift card to The Home Depot from the Atlanta Braves we filled up the car with a bunch of perennials that would keep coming back each year and filling in the space more and more each year.  Instead of regular mulch we decided to use recycled tires that have been chopped up and painted to look like mulch.  This rubber mulch is definitely more expensice, but it doesn't blow or float away as easily as other mulch, it's more environmentally friendly and it helps with drainage.  It also doesn't attract ants!!  YES!

This is the mulch we bought, in red, from The Home Depot

Once we had the grass and weeds cleared away it was time to plant the flowers.  There was a lot of discussion between the two of us at this point in time.  I thought we needed more flowers.  I wanted organization.  We settled on the flowers we have in an organized chaos look.  I think it turned out fantastic.  But I won't lie, I can't wait for the flowers to fill in some of the open space.

Here it is, the finished product!  Look how great it looks!!  

The last picture is a close up of the mulch - you can't even tell from that close that it's tired.  But if you pick it up and handle it it's definitely obvious.  Pretty neat.

That was all the work we could do on Saturday before we had some friends over for dinner.  Sunday morning Stephen went out and scrubbed down the white handrails and porch and the look great!  They need to be repainted soon, so that's another project to add to our list.  We're also going to paint the house numbers to they stand out more.  Red?  Black?  Not sure yet.

Not too bad for a long weekend!